The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Researchers working with NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that they may have found evidence of dark matter, an elusive substance that scientists believe constitutes a majority of the mass in our universe, but until now have been unable to actually detect.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, onboard the International Space Station (Photo: NASA)

The discovery is the first announced result from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion cosmic ray detector installed in May 2011 on the exterior of the International Space Station.

Astronomers have hypothesized the existence of dark matter since the 1930s, when they noticed that certain stars and galactic clusters weren't moving at the speeds expected based on the amount of matter we could see inside and around them. They postulated that there must be extra mass affecting these cosmic bodies, but we lacked the ability to detect it; later studies bolstered the theory, and astronomers now believe more than 80% of all matter in the universe is made of this "dark" stuff.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was designed to search for dark matter by collecting high energy radiation known as cosmic rays, and then sort through it looking for a certain class of particle believed to be created after two bits of dark matter collide in space and destroy each other. During its initial 18 months of operation, the AMS analyzed 25 billion cosmic rays and found over 400,000 positrons that displayed the expected energy signatures; that result, according to Ting and his fellow researchers, is excellent but not-yet conclusive evidence of the existence of dark matter.

“Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin,” Ting said in a statement.

The captured positrons might also have been produced inside stars called pulsars, Ting said, though so far the evidence points to dark matter explosions.

The AMS project is a joint initiative of 56 institutes in 16 different countries, but it's managed by a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Samuel Ting, the project leader, is a Nobel-prize winning physicist associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. The AMS is expected to remain operational for 10 to 18 years, collecting around 16 billion cosmic rays each year.